You might remember the webinar I accidentally delivered three times last week. Well this happened too.
Because apparently one disaster per twenty-four hours is strictly for amateurs.
By the time I’d finally pressed the right button, shared the right screen, and recorded a version of that webinar an actual human could watch, I was running dramatically late. I had a three-hour drive to Wakefield ahead of me, where the next morning I was filming a series of videos with Simon Day from Kingfishers Consulting.
So I did what any calm, organised professional does. I threw outfits into a bag like I was being timed by a hostile game show, and left.
Now, I should explain something about me.
I don’t wear a lot of makeup. When I do, it’s for me and it makes me feel put together … like a functioning adult who has definitely not just spent an hour narrating slides nobody could see. But I do have one secret weapon.
My blusher stick.
This little stick of magic travels everywhere with me. Pale? Blusher. Tired? Blusher. Mildly broken by technology? Blusher.
It is, essentially, my superhero cape in cosmetic form and my armour. If I were ever stranded on a desert island, it would make the essentials list. I might be alone, slowly going feral, talking to a coconut named Brian … but my cheeks would look fabulous.
The next morning, I woke up ready with my outfits planned, my camera ready in spirit, if not yet in skincare. I’d put on slightly more makeup than usual, because filming, with the whole plan being to soften it all at the end with my trusty blusher.
And then I reached for the blusher stick…. my armour.
It wasn’t there…..Panic.
Now, Old Georgie might have spiralled out of control… But New Georgie … fresh off surviving the Great Webinar Saga of, and I cannot stress this enough, the previous day … decided she was a resourceful woman.
So I improvised.
I looked at my lipstick and thought, Lipstick is basically blusher, I reasoned and it’s a colour, and it goes on a face. How different could it possibly be?
Reader….So different.
I dabbed a little onto my cheeks, expecting a soft, healthy glow. What I created was strawberry jam.
Not a blusher glow. Not “a touch much.” But sticky “jam like” spread liberally across my face like I’d lost a fight with a scone and here’s the thing nobody warns you about lipstick on cheeks.
It does not blend. It does not remove.
It simply lives there … sticky, glossy, and fully committed, like an uninvited houseguest who has already unpacked.
So I filmed.
A full day of professional content. Confident. Capable. Two cheeks quietly preserving themselves. I spent the entire shoot convinced I could feel it. A faint tackiness. The creeping certainty that at any moment a passing wasp might mistake me for a picnic.
Thankfully, when you watch the videos back, I genuinely don’t think you’ll notice.
No visible swarm. No hopeful migration of bees towards my face.
But if I look a little shiny or a little flushed or a little too radiant for someone who’d had the day I’d had …
it wasn’t nerves.
It wasn’t the lighting. It was the strawberry jam and tell me.
What’s your blusher stick?
The mug, the pen, the charger, the lucky socks, the one daft little thing that quietly holds your whole day together. I’d put money on it not being just me.
